


Inked

by what_alchemy



Category: The Breakfast Club (1985)
Genre: Addiction, Drugs, M/M, Self-Harm, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 08:55:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/708909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty years. </p><p>Five tattoos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inked

**I. Three black bars, left hip, April 1991**

Getting kicked out of MIT felt almost exactly like getting dumped buck-naked out of John Bender’s truck in the middle of a corn field at the end of senior year. 

Back then, after his parents had collected him from the police station with a lecture about how disappointed in him they were for getting mugged, he barricaded himself in his bathroom. He took one look in the mirror, at his own baby-butt face and its watercolor pinks and yellows and blues all running together, and a fire welled in him hot and huge. He slammed his head into the mirror. It cracked once, satisfyingly, with a smear of blood across its surface. So Brian did it again, and again, and one more time until blood ran into his eyes and the countless shards of mirror lay glittering around the sink, on the floor, a thousand glints of light from nowhere. He picked up a good one, too-tight-skin throbbing, and dragged the razor edge of it hard across one hip bone. Blood bloomed thick and dark, and the pain was clean and sharp and cool, and the terrible pinch around his heart and lungs eased. He did it again, half an inch beneath the first cut, and again, another half-inch under that. When he was done, he was calm and his mind for once felt perfectly still, and he crouched to clean up the mess he’d made.

Now, years later and a thousand miles away, Brian had violated his academic probation. He had been caught, again, with his nose full of coke and his final project only half-finished, and the dean’s office sent him packing. Brian wanted to find a box cutter, an X-acto, the nearest broken bottle of beer. But he didn’t. He spent the last of his money on a bunch of bennies and the moonshine some chemical engineer kids made on the sly. 

In their Roxbury apartment, with way too many empty bottles around them, Brian’s roommate Cisco made a proposition.

“You should get a tattoo,” he slurred, jabbing Brian in the ribs with the butt of a bottle. “A really big one that says ‘FUCK MIT.’ And you should, like, plaster every surface with a picture of it. Right? Right? Man, you _should_.”

“I should,” Brian echoed earnestly.

In the morning, he puked until he felt like his intestines might come pouring out of his gullet. When he finally had the strength to get up and start cleaning himself up, he noticed that his torso was all blacked in permanent marker and Cisco’s 3rd-grader handwriting. _FUCK MIT_ , it read, over and over. 

It made him think. It made him press a palm to the old scars that striped his hip, that used to be livid, that had spent the intervening years growing white and ceasing to ache. Yes, getting dumped by MIT felt a lot like getting dumped by John Bender. It felt a lot like having his future erased and the light turned out from his life. He snorted — wouldn’t Bender get a kick out of that, out of being, however briefly, the one happy thing in some dork’s life? Bender probably never spared a thought for him anymore. For his part, Brian had learned to stop thinking of Bender, too. 

The day after he lost everything, Brian Johnson wandered into a tattoo parlor in Jamaica Plain and asked for three black bars.

“Nothing fancy,” he said, trying not to stutter in front of the burly bearded guy whose black eyes raked over him skeptically. “Just — thick and straight.” He pulled his shirt up and the waistband of his khakis down to show the artist where he wanted it. 

The tattoo artist just nodded and led him to what looked like a dentist’s chair in the brightly-lit back room.

“Sit on it backwards,” the artist said gruffly as he pulled on some latex gloves. “Legs on either side, like you’re riding a horse.”

Brian had never ridden a horse before, but he straddled the chair gingerly anyway. He knotted his shirt up around his chest and pulled his pants down as much as decency would allow. He watched the tattoo artist fiddle with needles and ink all in plastic wrap. He wished he’d taken one of the Valium that was burning a hole in his bedside table drawer. His heart rattled his ribcage. 

“This’ll hurt, right?” he asked as the artist approached him with the needle. Black eyes flicked up to meet his. The artist put out one hand as if to steady the skin. He pulled it taut. Brian felt his thumb pass over the ragged, raised skin of his scars. 

“Sure will, kid,” he said, tone kind, and pressed the needle, buzzing, into his flesh.

Brian closed his eyes and soared on the red-black clarity of the pain. 

 

**II. Star coverup, right wrist, October 1994**

Brian was arrested in Brooklyn on larceny charges, and his parents bailed him out but didn’t even bother to tell him how disappointed they were. Didn’t bother talking to him at all. Later that night, he had a cardiac event. _25 years old,_ he’d heard the nurses whisper, shaking their heads. No one came for him when the hospital called his next of kin. 

The night before Brian entered court-mandated rehab, Esteban carved a crude ‘e’ into Brian’s wrist and poured warmed-up ink from a ballpoint pen into the wound.

“So you won’t forget me,” he said, and they kissed hard and biting. Esteban tasted like the end of a line of coke — bloody and bright. He begged Brian to fuck him without a condom, but Brian hushed him with hands through his hair, mouth on his cock, the promise that he’d be back.

The next time he saw Esteban, at the party of their mutual friends, he had a new boyfriend, so Brian didn’t bother saying _hello, I remember my promise, I remember you, I love you_. He wasn’t sure that last one was true, anyway. Brian’s roommate at the clinic had said something surprisingly profound to him in those first shivery days there: “Being high is just like being in love.” He had swayed, a small smile on his lips. “And mmm, ain’t love grand, boy? Just like all the storybooks.” 

Brian wasn’t sure what he felt for Esteban — pity, perhaps. A bit of envy, that he got to be blissed out on X and angel dust and whatever other happy shit Brian was now barred from. Brian wanted Esteban the way he wanted chemical alteration — sharply and shamefully, but like a memory from a past long evaporated and no longer accessible. He missed them like he missed high school. Not at all, and so much his stomach hurt. 

The tattoo parlor was dingy on the outside but shone with clinical cleanliness on the inside. That’s why he picked it. It had layers.

He sat in the chair and held out his arm. The tattoo artist — a woman with half her hair shaved and the other dyed a violent firetruck red — held his hand with a light touch and inspected the broken little ‘e’ with a furrow between her brows.

“This really blows, man,” she said. “I hope you learned your lesson about home ink jobs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brian said, and the tattoo artist tried for a sympathetic expression but managed only a half-smirk that made Brian feel like he was fifteen again. 

“Well, what are we gonna do about it?”

Brian stared at the ruin of the ‘e.’ It was squat and wide, lines shaky and faded. 

“What would be good?”

“That’s up to you, bud.”

Unbidden, he thought suddenly of John Bender, who had a series of cigarette burns up his ribs.

“The Bender constellation,” he had sneered when Brian ran his fingertips over them the first time. He had wanted to follow that touch with kisses, but he’d been too chicken shit, too afraid of all of Bender’s bluster. He wondered, for the first time in a long time, what Bender was doing. If his life had sunk as low as Brian’s. Somehow, schoolyard reputations and adult opinions about ‘that Bender kid’ aside, Brian thought no one could be as low as he had been. Bender, he thought, at least had the common sense Brian had always lacked. The common sense not to get addicted. The common sense not to get _caught_. 

Brian swallowed.

“A star,” he said. “Just a plain star.”

“Black?”

“Black.”

 

**III. HTML, chest, July 1997**

The day Brian got his high school reunion invitation in the mail, his boyfriend of two years and the man he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with broke up with him. 

“I just need something different,” Peter said. “Aren’t you bored, Bri?” He had tried to cup Brian’s face, but Brian slapped his hand away. 

“Get out then,” he said. And Peter got out, and Brian went to work in the IT department of a sprawling Queens law firm in the morning and scrubbed any trace of Peter from the apartment in the evening and forced himself to go out for drinks with friends — his glass always filled with pop alone — and just generally forgot about the fact that he ever graduated from Shermer High. Until his mother called.

“Are you coming home then?” she asked with that permanent note of distaste in her voice.

Brian sighed into the receiver.

“Why, is there something wrong?” He hadn’t even been home for Christmas in years. Last time he’d stepped foot back in Illinois, it was before his first stint in rehab, his grandmother had just died, and he’d had to suck off some guy in Bender’s old neighborhood for some blow. He cringed at the memory, then sent up a silent thanks to the universe that he was HIV negative.

Brian heard his mother’s tongue click.

“It’s your high school reunion, Brian. Didn’t you get your invitation?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Well, I have to tell you we turned your bedroom into a gym for your father. He has that heart thing.” An artery full of stents and a radical new diet meant to keep him from having a heart attack. Brian’s sister had told him all about it. “So you can either stay in the basement or find somewhere else.” That ‘somewhere else’ was vastly preferable than anywhere under his parents’ roof was implied, but Brian hadn’t spent a lifetime speaking the unique language of his family to miss it. 

“I don’t think I’ll come anyway, Ma,” he said, “but thanks.”

“Brian.” His mother sounded stern now, and Brian steeled himself for a lecture on what had become of his life. _You had so much potential_ , she’d say. _What happened to you?_ Or, God help him, _are you sure you’ve given girls a fair shake?_ Instead, he heard, “You should come home.”

And with that, Brian’s heart skipped. He didn’t know if he’d ever heard that tone before.

“Ma,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

So Brian went home in time to sit at his grandmother’s bedside and take a little abuse from her about his “lifestyle” before she died. He thought about going to the reunion — seeing the chess club guys he used to hang out with. And it would be nice seeing Allison, at the very least. And maybe Claire and Andy had grown up enough to talk to him now. Bender, he could rest assured, wouldn’t be caught dead at a high school reunion. But Brian couldn’t bear the thought of facing them — a gay recovering addict working as a grunt at the lowest tier of his office’s totem pole. 

He read _Maurice_ until the pages fell out and wondered where his fucking happy ending was. Where his Alec was. He wondered if any of those kids from chess club or detention could even comprehend where his life had taken him — certainly not the heights they’d imagined for him. Or — much more likely — they never thought of him at all. In fairness, he didn’t think of them either. He hoped that their lives were treating them right, but beyond that he never spared them a thought. Bender, of course, didn’t count. Bender was a memory to be taken out and inspected every other year or so, savored like the most bitter chocolate. Not too much, just enough for it to sting.

He underlined, then highlighted, then dogeared the page of a passage from the book. 

_Is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?_

His heart thundered, and he grabbed the keys to his mom’s car and headed out to Chicago.

The tattoo parlor he found was clean and modern and looked on the up and up. The girl at the front desk wore a spaghetti strap top and was decorated in brightly-colored flash from the neck down. She popped some bubble gum at him.

“You know what you want?”

“Yes,” he said, and produced a piece of paper from his pocket. He flattened it.

The desk girl frowned at it.

“Cleaned up, of course,” Brian said. “And bigger, like maybe an inch tall. Done up to look like, you know, a website. It’s computer code.”

The girl raised her eyebrows at him, held up a finger, and disappeared into the back with the piece of paper. When she came back a minute later, she asked for his ID and method of payment and laid a bunch of paperwork in front of him.

“You’re lucky our text expert is in tonight,” she said as he signed his name over and over again, promising to pay, promising he wasn’t drunk, promising he’d read all this stuff.

She led him into the back where the tattoo artist was laying out the necessary tools, his back to Brian. When she left the artist stood and turned, hand out to shake, and before he realized his heart was sinking, Brian found himself shaking the strong dry hand of John Bender.

Bender’s mouth quirked as he had to tilt his head up to meet Brian’s eyes.

“Well well,” he drawled. “Look who’s all grown up and getting tattoos.”

Brian’s breath caught. Bender was broader, but lean, and his hair was shaggy and clean and Brian could smell the shampoo. He had only a few tattoos, all text, snaking up from his wrists. 

“Bender,” he said faintly, barely holding back a stammer. He felt like kicking himself. He promised to do it later.

Bender let go of his hand and flourished a piece of paper at him. 

“This what you wanted?” he asked, and Brian took the piece of paper. Inside it was the code done proper, in Helvetica typeface, just about an inch tall and nine inches long. It looked better than he’d even thought it could.

“Um, yeah. Yeah, it’s great.”

“Okay, so where am I sticking this?” 

Brian’s heart was doing double time, but he managed to say, “Over my left pec.” 

Bender smirked.

“Better take off your shirt then, bright boy.”

Brian willed away the part of his brain that was fifteen and permanently scrawny and hopelessly into high school drop outs who shoved weed down his underwear. He skimmed his shirt off and sat back in the chair. He watched Bender catch sight of the fact that he was about four inches taller and fifty pounds of muscle heavier than last time they saw each other. Watched him catch sight of his bars, his star. 

“And here I thought I’d be your first,” Bender said, waving his needle. “Silly me.” 

Brian rolled his eyes.

“How does it feel to be stunted at sixteen, Bender?”

Bender snorted and pulled his rolling chair up to Brian. He was in gloves and he stepped on something to make Brian recline.

“Shit, _Brain_ , if I could go back to sixteen and tell myself it would be like this, maybe I wouldn’t have spent all that time fucking my own shit up.”

Brian had nothing to say to that. 

“So are you gonna tell me about what this means?” Bender asked as he shaved Brian’s chest clean.

“You ask every customer that?” 

Bender placed the design transfer over the bare part of his chest and smoothed it out.

“Just you, Bri-guy.”

“Christ, don’t call me that.” Bender only called him that to make fun of him, just like _Brain_. Actually, Bender pretty much only ever said anything with an edge of irony. Brian wasn’t sure he was capable of sincerity, and it seemed like that hadn’t changed in ten years.

Bender smirked at him. “ _Brian_ ,” he said with exaggerated gentility. 

Brian closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“It’s an E.M. Forster quote,” he said. “About preferring what’s real, even if it hurts, to the pretty thing that’s fake. That backslash means ‘end’ in HTML code. So — ‘end manufactured heaven.’ See?”

He could feel Bender staring at him, but when he opened his eyes, Bender’s gaze darted away. 

“And what’s the pretty thing that’s fake, here?” Bender asked, voice low.

Brian swallowed. He really wasn’t prepared to spill his guts about his most recent ex to his very first one. Something inside him curdled at the thought.

“Insincere fuckers who will never actually want you,” he said, and that was the end of the conversation.

 

 **IV. Auden quote, left forearm, March 1998**

Brian accepted the job in Chicago 100% because it was a better prospect for him actually doing software engineering instead of network troubleshooting and not at all because for the last eight months he’d been unable to stop imagining letters crawling up skin and carding his hands through silky, overlong hair and taking shotguns of weed from full, familiar lips.

Brian rifled through the books he was packing up until he found something he thought he liked well enough to have on his body forever. Then he went back to Chicago, back to that tattoo parlor, and back to that text expert.

If Bender was surprised to see him, he tamped down on it before Brian could see. With a jerk of his head, he beckoned Brian back and sidestepped the tattoo preliminaries with a different bored front desk jockey. Brian handed him the paper on which he had scrawled _All that we are not stares back at what we are_.

“As little as you can do it,” Brian said. “And sort of…tilted up my arm at an angle. Script this time.” 

Bender inspected it and nodded.

“You’ll have to give me a little time to draw it up right,” he said. 

“Sure,” Brian replied, and took a seat in the chair while Bender bent over a desk with paper and pencil. Brian watched him like that, muscles working underneath a threadbare t-shirt. He had read once that people imprinted on the first person they ever had sex with. He had dismissed it with a scoff at the time, but now, looking at Bender, he could only describe the gnaw he felt at his core as _hunger_ , and he wondered how much of what he read was true. He’d never been able to forget, after all. Not all the way. _How stupid that our hearts make decisions for us when we’re so young _, he thought. _How stupid that our brains can’t help but go along for the ride.___

__“Why did you kick me out that night?” he blurted, and he swore he felt his heart stop. Bender stilled and Brian held his breath. Bender straightened and swiveled in his chair to face Brian. He couldn’t parse the look on Bender’s face._ _

__“You’re not that stupid,” he said._ _

__Brian’s muscles tensed._ _

__“What the hell is that supposed to mean? I just asked you a question I think has been a long time coming.”_ _

__Bender’s mouth twisted into his ugliest sneer._ _

__“Do you even remember what we were talking about right before? Or do you just remember having to do the walk of shame to a gas station and the cops getting called?”_ _

__Brian clenched his jaw and felt the old embarrassment heat his face._ _

__“That was fucking low, Bender.”_ _

__“You know what was fucking low, Brian? Telling me you were getting as far from me as possible while my ass was still full of your come.” Bender crushed the paper he was working on into a ball and threw it in Brian’s face. Brian startled, but Bender was up and getting another piece of paper._ _

__“What?”_ _

__“You are such a dumbass,” Bender said, hunching back over the table and scribbling furiously._ _

__“No, seriously, what? What are you talking about?”_ _

__“MI fucking T, Johnson, or did you forget the _fake pretty thing_ you couldn’t wait to run away to?”_ _

__Brian felt his mouth working around words that wouldn’t come._ _

__“You…were mad I went to college? Jesus Christ, Bender, what a fucking selfish—”_ _

__“You could have gone to Northwestern,” Bender was saying, his voice muffled. “You could have gone anywhere in Illinois, or Indiana, or even St. Louis. I looked up all the schools that had mechanical engineering, and there were tons around here. _Tons_.”_ _

__Brian was breathing hard, remembering nights spent in Bender’s parents’ basement, or the back of Bender’s truck, or one perfect weekend in a tent in Indiana Dunes. He remembered insults — always tempered by touch, by a wet lush mouth and the hint of a smile. He remembered tracing Bender’s scars, the slope of his nose, the lines of his cheekbones and forehead. He remembered being still and peaceful and feeling like he was finally free. He had thought that he was the only one who knew what Bender was really like — wounded and smart and amazing at giving head. And then he remembered all of it being spoiled and never talking to Bender again and realizing everything they’d done had been a lie, a bit of fun, a way for Bender to get off._ _

__“You could have visited me in Massachusetts. Or, Christ, you could have just come to live there with me. I would have — I wanted that a lot, John.”_ _

__A harsh single laugh._ _

__“Fuck me, Johnson, how was I going to get the money to get out to Boston fucking Massachusetts? And what was I gonna do once I got there? Deal weed and watch you be ashamed and hide me from your egghead friends? No fucking thanks.”_ _

__He swept the paper he’d been working on to the floor and yanked another piece out. Brian was struck with the urge to reach out to that broad, tense shoulder._ _

__“Was it everything you dreamed?” Bender went on. “Was it nerdvana out there, the roads paved with motherboards?”_ _

__Brian wondered what would happen if he told the truth right now. _I tried so hard to do everything perfectly that I got addicted to being balls out fucked-up so I could be anyone but Brian the Brain and got kicked out and spent the next few years blowing drug dealers for my next hit until I got arrested and sent to rehab and then wasn’t qualified to do anything but work in frigging IT.__ _

__“No,” he said instead. “No, it didn’t work out, actually. I never finished.”_ _

__Bender looked up at him, brows drawn in a scowl._ _

__“You’re telling me Shermer High Class of 1987 Salutatorian didn’t graduate from college?”_ _

__“That’s what I’m telling you.”_ _

__And then, instead of laughing or smirking or doing some other brush-off, make-fun-of-Brian-Johnson, _Benderish_ thing, Bender only looked more pissed off and whipped around to face his table again._ _

__“What a fucking waste,” he said, hand clenched around his pencil. “What the hell was it worth, then? Jesus Christ.”_ _

__Brian ground his teeth together. He watched Bender scribble furiously over a new sheet of paper._ _

__“Let me get this straight. You were mad I went to MIT in the first place, and now you’re mad I didn’t finish? What the fuck, Bender?”_ _

__“ _The fuck_ , Brian,” Bender sneered, “is how goddamn senseless and ridiculous it was for you to go so far away and then not bother to get a fancy degree out of the whole thing.”_ _

__“Oh, because I _wanted_ to be a monumental junkie fuck up in and out of rehab instead of designing shit for NASA, I forgot.” He was on his feet, spitting the words at the back of Bender’s head before he even knew it had happened. _ _

__Bender swiveled around and stared up at him, brows drawn down, mouth a colorless arc._ _

__“You know what?” Brian said. “Forget this. I’ll go somewhere else.”_ _

__But Bender’s hand was a vice around his wrist._ _

__“A couple more minutes on this design,” he said, voice low, and turned back to his pencil and paper._ _

__Brian swallowed past the humidity gathering at the base of his throat and sat back down, crossing his arms. He stared at the back of Bender’s neck as he bent over his work, a strong, graceful curve obscured by overlong hair. He remembered what it felt like to press his lips to the freckles there, to feel how Bender would shudder against him if he did it just so. Brian’s heart clattered anxiously against his ribs._ _

__Minutes passed with only the scritch of Bender’s pencil to fill the silence. Finally, Bender presented his design to Brian wordlessly, and Brian answered only with a sharp single nod. Bender shaved him, transferred the design, prepared the needle and the ink — all without looking at him, all while Brian simply observed, drank him in._ _

__Brian’s eyes fluttered shut when needle met skin. Something cool unfurled in his chest._ _

__“And this one?” he heard Bender ask just loudly enough to carry over the buzz of the needle. “What’s this supposed to mean?”_ _

__“Regret and acceptance, I guess,” Brian said quietly._ _

__Bender got through two letters before asking, “What happened to you, Brian?”_ _

__And it was another letter before Brian responded._ _

__“Overachievers have really far to fall, Bender. I just… hit the ground hard.”_ _

__The hand steadying Brian’s arm was clinical, wrapped in latex, but the thumb that rubbed the inside of his elbow was warm and gentle._ _

__

__**V. Love, right shoulder, June 2008**_ _

__Brian printed out the chemical formula for oxytocin and slid it across to John at breakfast on a Sunday morning. John pushed his reading glasses up his nose absently and looked down at it. Brian’s heart swelled. He wanted to kiss the crook of John’s nose, to brush the graying hair back from his forehead, to trace with his lips the text crawling up his arms. Instead he clasped his hands and set them on the table in front of himself._ _

__“What’s this?” John asked._ _

__“My next tattoo,” Brian said._ _

__John hitched up an eyebrow at him, then went back to inspecting the neat little lines and letters._ _

__“It’s been a while,” he said._ _

__“Ten years.”_ _

__John set the sheet of paper down and sat back to regard Brian with a warm light in his eyes._ _

__“Ten years,” John said._ _

__Brian slid his hand over, palm up, and John tangled their fingers._ _

__“A good ten years, I hope?” John ventured. He tried for a smirk but didn’t get there. Brian gave his fingers a squeeze and nodded at the sprawling formula._ _

__“That’s how you make me feel,” he said. “Every day.”_ _

__John snorted._ _

__“Like a bunch of code?”_ _

__“Like I can fly,” Brian said._ _


End file.
